Great bike ride today, might be the last summer-weather ride of 2018. It's 82 and humid. It's a fluke for it to be this warm on Sept 26. There's nothing like a good workout to improve the spirits. It's chemical.

Kashmir Hill, reporting for Gizmodo: Last week, I ran an ad on Facebook targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove. Mislove studies how privacy works on social networks and had a theory that Facebook is letting advertisers reach users with contact information collected in surprising ways. I was helping him test the theory by targeting him in a way Facebook had previously told me wouldn't work. I directed the ad to display to a Facebook account connected to the landline number for Alan Mislove's office, a number Mislove has never provided to Facebook. He saw the ad within hours. One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a "custom audience." You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your "contact and basic info" page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it's going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way. Officially, Facebook denies the existence of shadow profiles. In a hearing with the House Energy & Commerce Committee earlier this year, when New Mexico Representative Ben Lujan asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg if he was aware of the so-called practice of building "shadow profiles", Zuckerberg denied knowledge of it.

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A former Google employee has warned of the firm's "disturbing" plans in China, in a letter to US lawmakers. BBC: Jack Poulson, who had been a senior researcher at the company until resigning in August, wrote that he was fearful of Google's ambitions. His letter alleges Google's work on a Chinese product -- codenamed Dragonfly -- would aid Beijing's efforts to censor and monitor its citizens online. Google has said its work in China to date has been "exploratory." Ben Gomes, Google's head of search, told the BBC earlier this week: "Right now all we've done is some exploration, but since we don't have any plans to launch something there's nothing much I can say about it." A report by news site The Intercept last week alleged Google had demanded employees delete an internal memo that discussed the plans. Google has not commented on the staff row, but said: "We've been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools." It added: "We are not close to launching a search product in China." Mr Poulson's letter details several aspects of Google's work that had been reported in the press but never officially confirmed by the company. It was submitted to the Senate Commerce Committee, which held a hearing on Wednesday in Washington DC. Google's chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, faced questions from Senator Ted Cruz about the company's intentions to launch a new search engine in China. He confirmed the existence of the project.

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UN said the toll includes 14 children as concern over air raids killing more civilians grows in the country.

UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has addressed his party's conference, taking aim at everything from racism, to Donald Trump and Brexit.

Filipinos angered by haphazard approach to safeguarding their lives after a mountain quarry collapsed.

Twenty thousand asylum seekers have arrived in Greece this year and are forced to remain on Aegean islands, where local authorities are overwhelmed.

Oumar Watt was allegedly beaten up by a French soldier, sustaining multiple bruises to the brain.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Whether you're trying to figure out how many students are attending your lectures or how many evil aliens have taken your Space Force brethren hostage, Wi-Fi can now be used to count them all. The system, created by researchers at UC Santa Barbara, uses a single Wi-Fi router outside of the room to measure attenuation and signal drops. From the release: "The transmitter sends a wireless signal whose received signal strength (RSSI) is measured by the receiver. Using only such received signal power measurements, the receiver estimates how many people are inside the room -- an estimate that closely matches the actual number. It is noteworthy that the researchers do not do any prior measurements or calibration in the area of interest; their approach has only a very short calibration phase that need not be done in the same area." This means that you could simply walk up to a wall and press a button to count, with a high degree of accuracy, how many people are walking around. The system can measure up to 20 people in its current form.

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Another day, another hearing of tech giants in Congress. Wednesday's hearing at the Senate Commerce Committee with Apple, Amazon, Google and Twitter, alongside AT&T and Charter, marked the latest in a string of hearings in the past few months into all things tech: but mostly controversies embroiling the companies, from election meddling to transparency. This time, privacy was at the top of the agenda. The problem, lawmakers say, is that consumers have little of it. From a report: The hearing said that the U.S. was lagging behind Europe's new GDPR privacy rules and California's recently passed privacy law, which goes into effect in 2020, and lawmakers were edging toward introducing their own federal privacy law. AT&T, Apple, Charter and Google used their time in the Senate to call on lawmakers to introduce new federal privacy legislation. Tech companies spent the past year pushing back against the new state regulations, but have conceded that new privacy rules are inevitable. Now the companies realize that it's better to sit at the table to influence a federal privacy law than stand outside in the cold. In pushing for a new federal law, representatives from each company confirmed that they support the preemption of California's new rules -- something that critics oppose. AT&T's chief lawyer Len Cali said that a patchwork of state laws would be unworkable. Apple, too, agreed to support a privacy law, but noted as a company that doesn't hoard user data for advertising -- like Facebook and Google -- that any federal law would need to put a premium on protecting the consumer rather than helping companies make money. But Amazon's chief lawyer Andrew DeVore said that complying with privacy rules has "required us to divert significant resources to administrative tasks and away from invention."

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Facebook's David Marcus, who until recently ran the Facebook Messenger before starting the blockchain group earlier this year, is defending the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg after a WhatsApp founder spoke critically of his experience at the company. Marcus: [...] On the business model. I was present in a lot of these meetings. Again, Mark protected WhatsApp for a very long period of time. And you have to put this in the context of a large organization with businesses knocking on our door to have the ability to engage and communicate with their customers on WhatsApp the same way they were doing it on Messenger. During this time, it became pretty clear that while advocating for business messaging, and being given the opportunity to build and deliver on that promise, Brian actively slow-played the execution, and never truly went for it. In my view, if you're passionate about a certain path -- in this case, letting businesses message people and charging for it -- and if you have internal questions about it, then work hard to prove that your approach has legs and demonstrate the value. Don't be passive-aggressive about it. And by the way the paid messaging that WhatsApp is rolling out now sounds pretty similar to metered messaging from my point of view... Lastly -- call me old fashioned. But I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class. It's actually a whole new standard of low-class. I'll close by saying that as far as I'm concerned, and as a former lifelong entrepreneur and founder, there's no other large company I'd work at, and no other leader I'd work for. I want to work on hard problems that positively impact the lives of billions of people around the world. And Facebook is truly the only company that's singularly about people.

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Continuing work on the new githubpub. One of the ideas I've been working towards is a similar kind of hierarchy in the repo as we had in the Frontier object database. I don't think it's practical to do the data gathering the website framework does as part of building a page. But there's a compromise, the idea of a default location. If I look for a template, for example, and don't find it in your database (i.e. repository), I then look in the system repo. It works. Not as cool as a completely hierarchic system, but two levels is better than none.

Qatar Petroleum says it plans to add a fourth LNG production line in its North Field, which it shares with Iran.

Cool response after Trump says he now backs a two-state solution to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Defeated president's party seeks to delay final vote results in move opposition condemns as 'bid to extend rule'.